Conversation about realistic expectations

All in all, last evening with Evan turned out to be very satisfactory. I started off as the evil foster mom, in the end...well...it was good.

His boyfriend who speaks to him every day on his cell phone (they both have the same carrier and can therefore speak indefinitely) called the house to ask if he could speak to Evan and said that it was urgent. Uh-huh. Right. I however took the cordless phone to Evan, who was talking to someone else on his cell phone. Half an hour later he called again. Now I figure if he is calling the house phone that means that Evan doesn't want to talk to him. I mean, Evan has call waiting. He never puts down the blasted cell. If Evan has turned off the phone to nap or rest or is just not taking boyfriend's calls, then I want to respect that. I certainly do not want to be pulled into the middle of some quarrel. So I told boyfriend, in what Hubby assures me was a very nice tone of voice, "You really have to call the cell, not the house line."

Evan, however, had picked up the other extension and heard this. He came upstairs hurt and angry. Could I PLEASE not be rude to his friends? Could I just be a LITTLE nice? Andrew and Brian have cell phones and I never tell their friends they are not allowed to call the house line. His boyfriend is very sensitive and worried about whether I like him and when I am RUDE like that, it really hurts him.

After everyone had gone to bed I went to remind Evan that he needed to do the dishes. He told me that he would, but that the dishes were not going anywhere and he was having a bit of a crisis here. I asked him if I could help. "Do you have any codeine?"

I said no, but that if he had time I really wanted to talk about summer school and work and managing stress.

We had a nice long talk. It took some doing, but I finally (I think)convinced him that there was no shame in telling people that he could not do everything that he had signed up for. That it was okay to tell the manager of the sandwich shop that he could only work weekends for the five weeks that he was in summer school.

He was worried about being fired. I told him that I thought it was unlikely, that this man is used to dealing with teenagers who just flake on him and will probably appreciate having one kid be upfront and tell him honestly what he can do.

The whole notion of making reasonable goals seemed quite foreign to him. (I blame all the motivational posters that say, "Aim for the stars, you just might make it to the moon.")

So I don't know what will happen next. He has not go to school without his drug in years and I know that no matter how much he minimizes the stress in other aspects of his life, that will be a challenge for him. So maybe he will make it. Maybe he won't. In either case though, I am glad that we had that conversation.

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